For years, it’s been thought that manspreading is a result of men needing room for their penises (peni?) to breathe. There’s an even better potential scientific explanation.

A good portion of the millions of manspreading men who prefer comfy testicles have no idea that this habit may actually be inborn. Simply, their bodies have to do it. According to data scientist Mark Skinner, who broke down the mathematics of manspreading to EconoMonitor:

“Based on our multivariate analysis of anthropometric parameters across multiple data sets, manspreading appears to be an adaptive strategy that men employ due to innate morphological characteristics.”

In other words, words words words words. Could it be possible that male babies manspread in the womb, then? Something to think about...

Gothamist reports further on Skinner’s findings:

For the first data set, he found that the average man’s shoulders were 28% wider than his hips, while the average woman’s shoulders were only 3% wider than her hips. He argues that “if a man sits on the subway with his knees together, and other passengers crowd in closely on both sides, then his torso likely won’t fit on the top half of the seat if his knees are positioned less than shoulder width apart.”

Sure, seats on public transportation are not the most spacious. Additional data mansplaining involved examining the bodies of military dudes, which found that “proportionally, a man needs to secure more seat space using his legs than a woman would need to in order for the man to maintain enough room to sit up straight in his seat.” Get it? Manspreading is just science.